The 100 most influential Americans

[MRT144]

madonna was a symptom not a cause

[Odin]

Originally posted by Kontiki
Reagan at 17, huh? Yeah.....

You can be influentiual in a good way and a bad way.

[Odin]

Originally posted by MRT144
madonna was a symptom not a cause

[Datajack Franit]

So I guess it´s the same for Mrs. Lewinski

[Kontiki]

I don't really hate Reagan the way lefties do. I just think his accomplishments are overated, primarily with respect to the Soviet Union.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Not a bad list. Franklin's a bit too high, and Dr. Spock is way, way too low.

But my big quibble is with Wilson even being on the list, let alone in the top ten. The ideological justification for an interventionist US foreign policy was developed by the powerful circle of friends and colleagues that included Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and Alfred Mahan, who then got the chance to put it into practice during the Spanish-American War and the Phillipine-American War. Their thinking can be found all over US 20th-century foreign policy. Wilson's mushheaded idealism, on the other hand, had little impact in his own time and less on US foreign policy since -- except recently, in certain quarters of the Bush administration.

Wilson

Otherwise, the list

[Zkribbler]

Sam Adams isn't there -- architect of the American Revolution. But that's okay. He believed in keeping a low profile, so being left off the list prob'ly makes him very happy.

Oh and BTW "27 Eli Whitney" -- also invented a little thing called the assembly line, critical for the Industrial Revolution.

[Dinner]

There is no way Reagan deserves to be in the top 20.

[Zkribbler]

I dunno. He lead the attack on America's middle-class, starting its long road to decline. He popularized giving huge tax-breaks to billionaires, racking up a staggering debt that we'll be paying off for generations. His miopic economic policies are key to the U.S.'s declining standard of living--we're now IIRC, No. 8 in the world.

He's had a tremendous influence.

[Adam Smith]

Vanderbilt or Harriman were far more important than Eastman.

Where are John L Lewis or Walter Reuther?

If Clay and Calhoun are included, why isn't Daniel Webster?

Definitely Ellington or even Gershwin instead of Armstrong.

Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi: One should be enough (Einstein)

J. P. Morgan should be slightly ahead of Rockefeller, not slightly ahead of Rachel Carson.

Margaret Sanger > Oliver Wendell Holmes??

Ralph Nader or Upton Sinclair?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Adam Smith
Definitely Ellington or even Gershwin instead of Armstrong.

No, they got that one right. Though I'm a bigger fan of Duke, I do think Armstrong's influence is almost impossible to underestimate. Or, put another way: Gershwin is unimagineable without Ellington, and Ellington is unimagineable without Armstrong.

edit: And it should go without saying that Armstrong should be higher up than Elvis, but I've carped enough about that in another thread for one lifetime.

[SlowwHand]

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Slavery, and the Civil War

According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 he said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!"

[Harry Tuttle]

I don't agree with Wilson being on the list and I'm glad they left Kennedy off the list. I would have thrown on a few more millionaire/robber barons on the list, but I think they did decent enough. Ronald Reagan probably shouldn't be on the list, yet, as a quarter century in the future we still don't know how far reaching his presidency really was.

Hmmmm, then again maybe they should have included Kennedy for violently escalating our involvement in Vietnam...

I think Omar Bradley should have been on their as well as a bunch of influential military men from the former part of the last century. You have to remember that a lot of American wins couldn't have been pulled off without the right men behind a project.

[Aeson]

Where is Sid Meier?

[One_more_turn]

They could put more scientists/engineers/inventors up there.

Nothing changes our lives more than major scientific breakthroughs.

I would put Claude Shannon, inventor of modern wireless transmissions, in place of Ralph Nader.

Semiconductors industry, the heart of every modern electronics and the key driver of America's tech boom, do not have a single representative on the list. I think Gordon Moore, co-inventor of Integrated Circuits and founder of Intel Corp, deserves a place on the list.